Meghan Markle’s Netflix show is her brand’s final hope

So here it is, the undistinguished thing, at last. I had hopes that, after its postponement because of the Californian fires, Meghan Markle’s new reality show With Love, Meghan, would quietly disappear from the schedules. These hopes were, as usual, dashed. Not only has the program arrived on Netflix as a simultaneous worldwide premiere, but there has been a blitzkrieg of hype that reminds the unwary that the Duchess of Sussex — or “Meghan Sussex”— is a very big, very famous deal indeed.

There has been a gushing interview with People and a New York preview screening for her most devoted fans, some of whom have celebrated the renaming of her forthcoming lifestyle brand As Ever by getting the words tattooed onto their arms. A few media outlets have even been live blogging With Love, Meghan, treating it with the gravity that most would associate with, say, President Donald Trump having a row with Zelensky in the Oval Office. After a quiet 2023 and 2024, Meghan — and this is very much a solo effort, with Harry reportedly relegated to a brief cameo in the last of the show’s eight episodes — is back, back, back.

I won’t be watching With Love, Meghan. I shouldn’t have thought that many Spectator readers will be, either, so it’s hardly worth my while doubling up as a television critic and giving a run-down of the program’s highs and lows. Besides, I’m still in low-level PTSD from having to watch several hours’ worth of Meghan’s previous foray into Netflix, Harry and Meghan, which came across as a strange, uncomfortable mixture of soft-focus lifestyle programming and a vicious full-frontal assault on the British royal family. At least this show, a determinedly fluffy lifestyle series, is unlikely to be such a challenging watch. No doubt it will appeal to fans of the Sussexes, who clearly exist, and the rest of us should leave it well alone.

Yet Meghan remains the most ardent of public figures. The promotional barrage that has accompanied the show’s advent has raised some pertinent questions. One area that she and Harry have talked about, time and time again, is their wish to keep their children, Archie and Lilibet, safe and away from the uglier and more intrusive aspects of public scrutiny. Harry knows whereof he speaks, having witnessed it all as a child with his mother, and it is hard to disagree with this parental impulse. So it comes as a surprise, to say the least, that the children appear in publicity for the show, not least in an Instagram story that Meghan shared, showing a card from her family saying “Congratulations Mumma! We love your show, and we love you!” signed “Lili, Archie and Papa.”

Rather than feel my previous disdainful contempt for this level of over-sharing, this has led me to feel sorry for the entire Sussex family. It is well-known that this show — appropriately enough with its emphasis on cooking and expensive foodstuffs — represents the final fruits of a lucrative Netflix deal struck several years ago, before Harry and Meghan became such a controversial commodity. If the Duchess wants to maintain her A-list status, the program has to be a success; we have to be impressed by it, and by her. Otherwise, her lifestyle brand, now cross-marketed with Netflix, will not receive the promotion that it inevitably needs to succeed; and Brand Sussex will seem a very tarnished enterprise indeed.

There is a tangible desperation here, a visceral sense of need and desire for this show to bring Meghan back into the spotlight, not as the wounded victim of a thousand negative headlines, but as the perky, all-American tradwife that her advisors have doubtless told her the public are receptive to. So she will cajole her children on screen and rent a $6 million house to do the filming in and produce Instagram content by the truckload. With Love, Meghan is less a lifestyle show and more an unintentionally revealing insight into an intelligent and ambitious woman attempting to cling to fame by any means possible. It has managed to do something that I would never have imagined before: make me feel the greatest sympathy for her. Being Meghan Sussex is not a position, but a predicament, and now, amidst the soft-focus flower arrangements, it is all too clear to the world what she goes through.